HEP Part-Time and Contingent Faculty Issues

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This is the discussion area for the HEP Part-Time and Contingent Faculty Issues forum. Please feel free to join, post calls for papers, new initiatives for Part-time Faculty activism, and questions about contingency and pedagogy to the group!

The Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages (WCML) is now accepting submissions for its annual awards. The Caucus is gender-inclusive and welcomes feminist scholarship from all authors. Please note that there are no membership dues for graduate students and for those whose income is below $20,000 a year. For further information about these a…[Read more]

The scholarly journal Academic Labor: Research and Artistry has published its latest issue, and it includes a submission from me that reviews two recent books on contingent academic labor: “Reviews of Daniel Davis’s Contingent Academic Labor and Lisa del Rosso’s Confessions of an Accidental…[Read more]

I first observed the starkly different working conditions of full-time and part-time faculty as an English department secretary many years ago. Fast forward 35 years: Too little has changed at too few institutions for larger and larger numbers of adjunct, non-tenure-track, term, or contingent faculty. I teach at up to four northeast Ohio colleges…[Read more]

This presentation explores ethical dilemmas for graduate school educators in programs that prepare M.A. students to teach English in community colleges. Such graduate programs attract students and produce strong, enthusiastic teachers, and university administrators value the programs because they draw tuition; however, the job prospects for…[Read more]

The idea that the US media is biased against organized labor may seem too obvious to require comment and research, but the details are quite important to understanding to to communicate more effectively between voices of the labor community and voices of management. The common assumption that labor media coverage became more skewed with the…[Read more]

This 22 December 2016 U. S. Department of Labor Unemployment Insurance Program Letter (UIPL) provides guidance to states about the interpretation of “contract” and “reasonable assurance of future employment” in determining eligibility for unemployment insurance of adjunct faculty members in higher education. The guidance in this UIPL supersedes…[Read more]

I accept the Truman Capote Award in this spirit of justice. I would be remiss, therefore, if I did not address another injustice tarnishing the literary critical profession. I am, so far as I can tell, the first adjunct faculty member to receive this award. To be sure, I have one of the…[Read more]

This infographic represents an in-progress attempt by the #Humetrics team at TriangleSCI to pin down values that, if encouraged and incentivized in the academy, would enrich and improve humanities scholarship. It is meant to start a conversation. What are we missing? See more about the process and thinking behind this approach at…[Read more]

This year the MLA Executive Council is sponsoring the roundtable session “Low-Wage Work: The Boundary Condition of University Labor” on Saturday, January 7th from 8:30-9:45 in 103A, Pennsylvania Convention Center. Please share information about this session widely:

This panel was designed to address the convention’s featured issues of the academic profession, publishing & editing, open access, and new technologies. Using a roundtable format, the panel discussed how open access publications are transforming the kind of research that is possible and necessitating new editorial practices. The session hosted an…[Read more]

The Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession is planning a roundtable for the 2017 MLA convention in Philadelphia tentatively entitled: “Could this get me fired? Employment rights and risks for just-in-time faculty.”

We’re particularly interested in ensuring that our least job-secure colleagues are represented on the roundtable, so I’d l…[Read more]

The Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession will be hosting a coffee hour on Saturday, January 9 between our two panel sessions. We invite you to join us from 11:30-1:30 in 502-503 of the JW Marriott to share ideas and initiatives. Additional information is available here: https://contingent.mla.hcommons.org/.

I’d like to invite any members of this forum attending the 2016 convention to participate in the first ever Commons literary trivia quiz, which will take place next Thursday night at the JW Marriott. It’s free, promises to be unabashedly nerdy, but should be fun too! A cash bar and prizes will be available.

Join for coffee and a discussion of postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities, both best practices for positions and programs and pressing questions about the role of the postdoc position in humanities research initiatives, the casualization of the academic workforce, and the larger profession.

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This is the discussion area for the HEP Part-Time and Contingent Faculty Issues forum. Please feel free to join, post calls for papers, new initiatives for Part-time Faculty activism, and questions about contingency and pedagogy to the group!